Poetic Youth Ministry

Learning to Love Young People by Letting Them Go

Lief

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498202442
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Current research shows what many in the Christian community already know: young people are leaving the church. This raises important questions: Why are young people leaving? How can the church respond? Some have responded to this issue out of a posture of fear and anxiety, trying to find new ways to strengthen doctrinal beliefs or practices of faith formation and discipleship. What if the best response isn't to strengthen our theology or tighten our hold on the lives of young people? What if the best response is a posture of love that lets young people go? Using the insights of philosopher Charles Taylor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Poetic Youth Ministry argues that the church must take seriously the formative power of social and cultural patterns that shape the social imaginaries of young people. Rather than seeing the problem as young people abandoning faith, the Christian community should see the issue as young people exchanging one form of faith for another. This allows the church to approach the issue from a posture of love, calling young people to embrace their identity in the new humanity revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Chapter 1

Vapor Trails

Young People Leaving the Church

The film WALL-E takes place in a future where human consumption has trashed the earth, forcing people to live in spaceships while garbage-collecting robots clean the planet for future rehabitation.1 As one particular robot named WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class) goes about his work he collects cultural artifacts and stores them in his makeshift home. His most prized possession is a video recording of Guys and Dolls that plays in the background as he carefully organizes the day’s haul: a spork, a Rubik’s cube, and a lighter. At one point WALL-E stops to watch the TV, mesmerized as the characters hold hands and sing to each other. His gaze moves from the screen to his robotic hand. His obsession with human culture has awakened a form of consciousness, transforming a garbage-collecting robot into a relational, cultural being.

WALL-E’s experience is in stark contrast to the humans living in space. Talking advertisements in the opening scenes tell a back story of human consumption and waste symbolized by the corporate power of Buy N’ Large. The story eventually moves to a gigantic ship called the Axiom, where the temperature is always a perfect 72 degrees and humans float around on chairs as their needs are met by robots. While WALL-E has developed the humanlike capacities for work, culture, and relationships, the humans living on the Axiom are infantile and mechanistic. Unable to do anything for themselves, every activity—from eating, to playing, to moving from place to place—is done for them by machines. Incapable of social interaction, they communicate through screens. A giant sign reads “Welcome to the Economy” as advertisements displayed on the screens in front of them tell them what to wear and what to eat. They have no memory of earth or the way of life that once formed their identity as human beings.

At the center of this film is a question about human identity: What does it mean to be human? In many ways WALL-E is more human than the humans—he works, engages in cultural activity, and desires relationships. The humans, on the other hand, have become an abstraction. Enslaved to their machines, they live perfect lives in a perfect environment with no need for relationships or intimacy. They have “overcome” the earth, transcending their creaturely human identity for something “better” or more ideal. The story focuses on the tension between an abstracted humanity, content to live millions of miles away in outer space, and a garbage-collecting robot who awakens them to their humanity and brings them back down to earth.

A primary theme of WALL-E is the human ability to transcend or overcome every limitation through powerful techniques and processes. It is a quest for freedom fostered by a desire for an “ideal” world in which all limitations are overcome. This way of seeing the world emphasizes improvement and progress as a form of sanctification through which humans become better, improved, and successful—supported by systems and institutions that educate, nurture, form, and reform. Politics, economics, health care, and education become the social and cultural caretakers of what is considered “normal” and “ideal.”

Increasingly, this represents the lived experience of young people in the West. As past stories and practices lose their authority, the way young people make meaning and construct identity is radically changed. No longer is identity something given, it is something that is constantly negotiated. The processes embedded within Western cultural institutions contribute to this by emphasizing discipline and improvement as the way to become ideal, successful human beings who positively contribute to society. This cultivates a desire for transcendence that creates an endless cycle of making and remaking identity in order to attain an ideal way of life. It is endless because it is impossible to attain; it is impossible because it is grounded in a view of humanity that is an abstraction. The result is a constant state of anxiety: the harder we try to attain it, the further we find ourselves from it. This is the world of the Axiom—the unattainable ideal human condition.

This reality became apparent to me when I was asked to speak at a local youth gathering. I was asked to address the issue of identity so I began with the question: What does it mean to be human? To get the discussion started I used a clip from WALL-E that shows WALL-E first arriving on the Axiom. As the scene played everyone laughed at the ridiculous portrayal of hyper-reality that showed humans floating on chairs, talking through screens, and acting like helpless infants. When the scene ended I asked, “What went through your mind as you watched this clip?” Instantly a young woman blurted out “Dude! That’s totally us!” causing the whole group to laugh, nodding their heads in agreement. “Really?” I responded. “So, what are you going to do about it?” I asked. “Oh, nothing,” she replied.

In a matter of moments this group of young people experienced both recognition and resignation. They recognized their social and cultural life as it played on the screen, and many of them realized how ridiculous it looked. Yet, they also recognized the tight grip this way of life has upon how they imagine the world. They admit that it is problematic, but they have resigned themselves to the fact that they are not going to do anything about it.

This response to WALL-E reveals the complex issues at work in the current problem of young people leaving the church. As young people make meaning and construct identity they do so living within powerful social and cultural structures that offer a competing vision of the higher good and what it means to be human. Increasingly, as the research shows, young people find this alternative view of the world to be much more convincing.

What’s Happening?

In 2012 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released the findings of a recent study that explored the religious commitments of Americans. The report, “‘Nones’ on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults have No Religious Affiliation,” found that the number of Americans who claim no religious belief has risen 5 percent in the last five years from 15 percent of the population to 20 percent of the population.2 For this study the term “none” was used to refer not only to people who claim no religious affiliation, including those who self-identify as atheists and agnostics, but also to a number of participants who claim some form of spirituality but do not identify with traditional forms of religion. Much of the growth in this category comes from people under thirty. According to the report:

The growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans—sometimes called the rise of the “nones”—is largely driven by generational replacement, the gradual supplanting of older generations by newer ones. A third of adults under 30 have no religious affiliation (32%), compared with just one-in-ten who are 65 and older (9%). And young adults today are much more likely to be unaffiliated than previous generations were at a similar stage in their lives.3

Similarly, David Kinnaman, author of the book You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving the Church and Rethinking Faith, reports that roughly three out of five young Christians (59 percent) are “disconnecting” from the faith sometime between adolescence and their late twenties and thirties.4 Kinnaman writes:

The ages eighteen to twenty-nine are the black hole of church attendance; this segment is “missing in action” from most congregations. . . . The percentage of church attendees bottoms out during the beginning of adulthood. Overall, there is a 43 percent drop off between the teen and early adult years in terms of church engagement. These numbers represent about eight million twentysomethings who were active churchgoers as teenagers but who will no longer be particularly engaged in church by their thirtieth birthday.5

A 2007 LifeWay Research survey suggests that 65 percent of young adults who attended church as teenagers stopped attending for at least a year between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two.6 For Kara Powell and Chap Clark, the authors of the book Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids, this supports their claim that at least 40 to 50 percent of young people “who graduate from a church or youth group will fail to stick with their faith in college.”7

Finally, “The National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR),” a longitudinal study that explored the religious experience of young people, reported a significant change in the religious participation of young people as they move through adolescence.8 In his book Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Christian Smith describes how close to 40 percent of the young people who participated in the five-year study demonstrated a noticeable decline in religious belief and practice.9 This data shows that adolescents have a hard time articulating their beliefs, and when they do it tends to take the form of what he calls Moral Therapeutic Deism. Smith summarizes it this way:

The creed of this religion, as codified from what emerged from our interviews with U.S. teenagers, sounds something like this:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Vapor Trails
• Chapter 2: Weakening Our Theology
• Chapter 3: The Pastoral Power of the Modern Social Imaginary
• Chapter 4: Failed Commodities
• Chapter 5: The Religious Problem
• Chapter 6: Faith, Youth, and the Task of the Christian Community
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography